When Novels Were Bad For You

When people bemoan the alleged ill effects of reading online, they often hold up reading a good novel as the more wholesome alternative. But a few hundred years ago, novels were the suspect medium, accused of leading people astray and ruining them for real life.

In her Slate essay on the phenomenon of “reading insecurity,” Katy Waldman describes the current climate:

“It is becoming a cliché of conversations between twentysomethings (especially to the right of 25) that if you talk about books or articles or strung-together words long enough, someone will eventually wail plaintively: ‘I just can’t reeeeeaaad anymore.’ The person will explain that the Internet has shot her attention span. She will tell you about how, when she was small, she could lose herself in a novel for hours, and now, all she can do is watch the tweets swim by like glittery fish in the river of time-she-will-never-get-back.”

The feeling that Internet reading is lesser isn’t just in young people’s heads, she argues — “books and articles probe the Way We Read Now” and “a long train of studies suggests that people read the Internet differently than they read print.” She also puts disdain for e-reading in historical context, noting that spoken language has long been depicted as unreliable (this may be especially true of language spoken by women, a topic Mary Beard has examined in much greater detail). Ms. Waldman writes:

“I can’t help thinking that the hoary debate around ‘orality and literacy’ — the slippery nature of one versus the stable authority of the other — is back, sort of. This time we’ve cast the new technology as the unreliable flibbertigibbet and the relic-like printed book as the trusty source.”

But it’s not necessarily just any book that’s now treated as the trusty source. Ms. Waldman compares scrolling through Twitter to losing oneself in a novel. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist who studies reading, told Michael S. Rosenwald at The Washington Post about trying to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” after a day of heavy Internetting:

“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it. It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

Even defenders of e-reading sometimes use the novel as a comparand. Here’s Nicole Dieker of The Billfold, responding to Ms. Waldman:

“I wouldn’t go back to the ‘good old days.’ Getting lost in the Narnia books as a child may have felt like magic, but e-readers plus libraries equals actual magic.”

But novels weren’t always seen as healthy alternatives to more mind-warping forms of media. In “Madame Bovary” (1856), Gustave Flaubert describes a teenage Emma Bovary who “made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.” Her novel-reading leads her to elaborate daydreams:

“Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields.”

And when Emma compares her life with what she reads, she finds the former disappointing:

“Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

“In Madame Bovary, I think Flaubert is channeling a century of worries about young women as particularly susceptible to the fantasies they find in novels and the seductions of reading,” Margaret Cohen, a professor of French language, literature and civilization, told Op-Talk.

From the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th, she added, women “were considered to be in danger of not being able to differentiate between fiction and life.”

Flaubert may have been working out some of his own anxieties in “Madame Bovary” (which is, of course, itself a novel). “Flaubert himself was really split between that romantic imagination and a kind of realism,” said Ms. Cohen, “and his friends kept on pushing him away from his romanticism. Part of ‘Madame Bovary’ is Flaubert trying to exorcise his own really powerful romantic imagination.”

He wasn’t the only novelist to play with ideas about reading. Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” (1817) tells the story of Catherine Morland, a lover of novels whose reading makes her believe a man she’s staying with is a murderer. “Catherine is your typical young woman who can’t distinguish between fact and fiction,” said Ms. Cohen. But like Flaubert, Austen wasn’t wholly antinovel, as some of Catherine’s instincts turn out to be right: “Austen is kind of satirizing excesses of the wrong kind of novel-reading, but she’s also praising the ability of novels to cultivate judgment and taste.”

“Jane Austen is actually mocking a lot of the anxiety that surrounded women reading novels,” Barbara M. Benedict, an English professor who has written on “Northanger Abbey,” told Op-Talk. “Novel reading for women was associated with inflaming of sexual passions; with liberal, radical ideas; with uppityness; with the attempt to overturn the status quo.”

“Northanger Abbey” makes fun of “the stupidity of a social reaction that portrayed women as so stupid that they would not be able tell difference between reality and fiction, that they would really think when they were reading a novel that they were reading a blueprint for their own lives,” Ms. Benedict added.

While she sees today’s fears as different from those of Austen’s time — more focused on what we find on the Internet than on how we read there — she does find one similarity. As in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, our contemporary anxieties about reading reflect a “distrust of the individual being able to differentiate good from bad material, or using the information that they absorb productively, constructively and safely.”

Meanwhile, what was once seen as a hazard of novel-reading is now lauded as a strength. Today, many value novels for promoting sustained attention — for helping readers, in Ms. Dieker’s words, to get lost. But for some of the novel’s 18th- and 19th-century critics, getting lost was exactly the problem. “Novel reading was so absorptive,” Ms. Cohen explained, “and that was seen as one of its dangers, in that it would divorce you from everyday life. Whereas the problem that people seem to be talking about now is the opposite of absorption, it’s distraction.”

We may still worry about some media absorbing too much of us — Ms. Cohen noted an echo of earlier concerns about young women and novels in the current discourse on young men and video games. But the idea that novels could be dangerous seems largely have fallen by the wayside, which does raise the question of how today’s newer sources of entertainment and information will look to the critics of the future. In 50 years, maybe we’ll be lamenting our failure to read enough Internet.

What's Next

About This Blog

Op-Talk is your guide to today's debates and the variety of voices behind them. From pizza to politics (and the politics of pizza), we offer new ways of looking at what's exciting, troubling, and inspiring.